The Sandra TextsScene 8

When Katherine was lonesome for Joshua she would give
to him objects, little objects. Joshua did not notice this
until the day he left for El Paso.

Everything he owned fit into a rental car. That's how he
had moved himself from Indiana to San Antonio. That's how he
had moved himself back from San Antonio to southern Kansas.
And that's how he would now move himself from southern Kansas
to El Paso. Joshua and Katherine were packing his few things
into such a rental car when he at long last discerned this
gesture of hers.

"Here. Take this," she said. "You will need this." Her
flushed face stooped over a box. A roll of camera film, it
was. Joshua did not need a roll of camera film.

"Here. You'll need this." And she was putting one of her
books of Russian poetry into another box. She paused then.
She looked at him. Katherine breathed.

Before those moments Katherine's feigned stoicism had
convinced Joshua. But at those moments his insight pierced
through it to her breadthless love. He remembered suddenly
the stick of gum she had slipped into his breast pocket as
they stood in the Indianapolis airport awaiting her departure
for St. Petersburg. He remembered too the unexplained can of
soup she bought for him at the end of her visit to San
Antonio.

"Thank you, my dear," Joshua answered. He stopped
resisting then these little gifts. He began to let Katherine
give to him these little objects he did not need, these
little objects that only swelled his impedimenta.

It was the end of their fourth and last summer together.
A summer Joshua had spent seeing Katherine off every morning
to her job at an insurance company. A summer he had spent at
a card table in Katherine's bedroom drafting the outline of
his first novel. A summer which, beginning awkwardly, had
mellowed as they came to know one another again, as their
intimacies reawoke, as the estrangement of time and distance
passed. That summer Joshua broke up his long days of work
with walks through a nearby bosk, with meditations on flora
and insectlife and birds. That summer Joshua composed his
first sonnet for Katherine, and wrote his first piece of real
fiction. It was a summer whose late afternoons meant tennis
between them on the apartment complex courts, and then cool
showers before hot meals of pasta and the evening news. A
summer in which Joshua read Hamlet for the first time, and
spent eight to ten hours a day working for the first time,
and felt, for the first time, the suggestion of the writer he
might become.

"Here you go. You'll need this, Joshua."

It was a wooden spatula.

"Katherine, my dear."

To reconcile his writing with his love for Katherine,
Joshua decided to teach. He entered a teacher's
certification program at a small university in El Paso.
There was the answer! He would give to her stability by
teaching Spanish. He would provide for her an income by
teaching Spanish. And still he would have his summers free--
to write, to travel. This was the middle road Joshua
envisioned. By Christmastime, though, he saw this middle road
for what it was--a mirage. These paths our two actors want to
follow are separate and distinct paths. They do not meet.
They do not intersect.

The rental car was a blue Chevrolet Lumina with red trim
and gray interior. Years later when writing of that scene
Joshua would remember the color of the vehicle, and remember,
too, the glint of sun off the windshield, and the azure sky
reflected in it. He would recall also how it was not until
every object he possessed was crammed inside that car, and
Katherine was forced to behold this fact, that Katherine
seemed to appreciate his great accomplishment of having
accumulated nothing. Her apartment was charming and quiet and
comfortable, but full of baubles brought back from Russia,
and potted plants, and furnishings. She shook her head at
him. She chortled incredulously at him. And he stuffed a
blanket, the last of his possessions, into the gaps in the
trunk. And then he hopped up on the hood of the trunk to
fasten it true.

A long time of emptiness followed. Joshua and Katherine
sat together on her couch. They communed of the desolate air.
He described pointlessly for her the wretched verminous flat
he had rented in El Paso. He talked of his landlord who did
not speak English; of how he had crossed the border into
Ciudad Juárez briefly; of how he had liked the ambience of
Albuquerque when passing through it. Pointlessly, he said
these things. Pointlessly, because Katherine was not really
listening, because he was not really speaking. They were
just drawing out their silence together then, drawing it out,
drawing it out to the end.

And then, still very early in the day, maybe noon, the
hour came. Joshua had to get back to El Paso in time to
unpack the car without waking his crowded neighbors. He had
to leave.

The rental car running beneath him, their goodbyes
having been said again and again over the previous several
days, Katherine leaned through the window and gently kissed
Joshua.

"Here," Katherine said. "For when you're thirsty."

A soda can, it was, cold and sweating, from her
refrigerator.

And as Joshua backed out of that parking space, as he
pulled away from Katherine's comfortable apartment, Joshua
felt as if he were breaking some great unwritten law. Too,
he felt, that to drive on, to defy this law, was to snip the
last of the tenuous threads binding he and Katherine
together.